Whose Knowledge is Valued? Epistemic Injustice in CSCW Applications

There are gaps in understanding in and between those who design systems of AI/ ML, those who critique them, and those positioned between these discourses. This gap can be defined in multiple ways - e.g. methodological, epistemological, linguistic, or cultural. To bridge this gap requires a set of translations: the generation of a collaborative space and a new set of shared sensibilities that traverse disciplinary boundaries. This workshop aims to explore translations across multiple fields, and translations between theory and practice, as well as how interdisciplinary work could generate new operationalizable approaches.

This article presents a pedagogical approach for disrupting epistemic injustice. In it, A. C. Nikolaidis first demonstrates that different forms of epistemic injustice — testimonial, hermeneutical, and contributory — are the result of limited or distorted conceptual resources and then argues that concept proliferation can be a promising educational means for overcoming such limitations and distortions. Concept proliferation involves a combination of increasing exposure to diverse, especially marginalized, concepts and providing students with necessary critical tools for questioning harmful and erroneous concepts. Concept proliferation is beneficial for both individual students and society at large. It liberates students from the confines of harmful concepts that limit their self‐understanding, but also provides them with skills necessary to challenge hegemonic concepts that distort collective (social) understanding and contribute to epistemic and systemic injustice.

This conceptual article critically examines the pervasive issue of epistemic injustice within educational settings. Drawing from critical theory and social justice frameworks, this paper aims to uncover and critically analyse the various forms of epistemic injustice in education settings, focusing on marginalised and underrepresented groups. Through lensing within the transformative worldview and employing conceptual analysis to make sense of the arguments, this paper explores how epistemic injustices manifest through biased curriculum design, pedagogical approaches, and assessment methods. The article argues the detrimental impact of epistemic injustice on marginalised students. Additionally, it evaluates strategies and interventions to address epistemic injustice in education, such as inclusive pedagogical practices, curriculum reforms, and the promotion of diverse perspectives in knowledge systems. I propose alternative approaches for creating inclusive learning environments towards dismantling epistemic injustice. This paper contributes to the scholarly discourse on epistemic justice, calling for the transformation of educational practices and policies to promote equity, inclusion, and the recognition of diverse knowledge and experiences, inspiring stakeholders to actively work towards achieving epistemic justice for all students.

Pathocentric epistemic injustice is a form of epistemic injustice that affects ill persons. In this paper I deal with pathocentric epistemic injustice in psychiatry that impacts persons with psychiatric conditions. There are several sources of such epistemic injustice, ranging from the agential level to the structural, institutional and even to the theoretical level of healthcare and medicine. In this paper I explore theoretical conceptions as sources of pathocentric epistemic injustice in psychiatry. Specifically, I focus on the notion that the naturalistic conception of health is an epistemically unjust theoretical conception when it exclusively privileges the epistemic resources of biomedical sciences. Supposing this claim is correct, this paper tries to offer a way of ameliorating the pathocentric epistemic injustice caused by the naturalistic conception of health. I argue that the first step of the ameliorative project lies in emphasis and acknowledgement of the concepts that embody the patient perspective, such as harm, well-being and suffering. While these concepts are found in the theoretical sphere of psychiatry, they are underdeveloped and lack proper attention. Furthermore, while elaborating on these concepts is necessary, it is not sufficient for epistemic justice in psychiatry. Thus, I introduce the idea of epistemic pillars of psychiatry - scientific research, clinical work and patient's perspective. Epistemic justice in psychiatry does not rely on any one these elements, rather it rests on the collaboration, compromise and mutual recognition of these spheres. It lies in harmony of the three pillars of psychiatry, rather than in either element being the dominant one.

To find out what is in one’s own best interest, it is helpful to ask one’s epistemic peers. However, identifying one’s epistemic peers is not a trivial task. I consider a stylized political setting, an electoral competition of ‘Masses’ and ‘Elites’. To succeed, the Masses need to know which alternative on offer is truly in their interest. To find out, the Masses can pool their privately held information in a pre-election ballot, provided that they can reliably find out with whom they should pool information. I investigate the process of finding the relevant peer group for information pooling by modelling this group formation process as dynamic network change. The simulations show that the Masses can succeed in finding the right peers, but they also suggest reasons why the Elites may often be more successful. This phenomenon generalizes to the notion of Epistemic Network Injustice. Such injustice arises when a subset of citizens is systematically deprived of connections to helpful epistemic peers, leading to their reduced political influence. Epistemic Network Injustice is a new form of epistemic injustice, related to but distinct from the notion introduced by Miranda Fricker.

Media and political debates on refugees and migration are dominated by a discourse of ‘fake’ and ‘bogus’ asylum claims. This article explores how this discourse affects in acute ways those people claiming asylum on grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity (SOGI). In particular, the article shows how such a discourse of ‘fakeness’ goes far beyond the well-documented and often inadequate credibility assessments carried out by asylum authorities. By framing the analysis within the context of the scholarship on epistemic injustice, and by drawing on a large body of primary and secondary data, this article reveals how the discourse of ‘fake’ SOGI claims permeates the conduct not only of asylum adjudicators, but also of all other actors in the asylum system, including non-governmental organizations, support groups, legal representatives, and even asylum claimants and refugees themselves. Following from this theoretically informed exploration of primary data, the article concludes with the impossibility of determining the ‘truth’ in SOGI asylum cases, while also offering some guidance on means that can be employed to alleviate the epistemic injustice produced by the asylum system against SOGI asylum claimants and refugees.

In this article I analyse two complaints of white vilification, which are increasingly occurring in Australia. I argue that, though the complainants (and white people generally) are not harmed by such racialized speech, the complainants in fact harm Australians of colour through these utterances. These complaints can both cause and constitute at least two forms of epistemic injustice (willful hermeneutical ignorance and comparative credibility excess). Further, I argue that the complaints are grounded in a dual misrecognition: the complainants misrecognize themselves in their own privileged racial specificity, and they misrecognize others in their own marginal racial specificity. Such misrecognition preserves the cultural imperialism of Australia’s dominant social imaginary—a means of oppression that perpetuates epistemic insensitivity. Bringing this dual misrecognition to light best captures the indignity that is suffered by the victims of the aforementioned epistemic injustices. I argue that it is only when we truly recognize difference in its own terms, shifting the dominant social imaginary, that “mainstream Australians” can do their part in bringing about a just society.

Reflecting on the rapid growth of epistemic injustice scholarship, this article proposes an ‘active alignment account’ for relating epistemic and social justice. The account contains both critical and constructive elements. The critical aim of the article is to argue that debates about epistemic and social justice are commonly misaligned. A focus on epistemic injustice can distort social justice agendas and epistemic recognition can be actively turned against the material interests of epistemically recognized actors. The constructive aim of the article is to show that epistemic justice nonetheless remains central to many social justice agendas. Recognizing both distortions and centrality leads to the demand of ‘active alignment’ according to which epistemic justice needs to be proactively connected with material conditions of social justice.

The article argues that current discussions on epistemic injustice, centered around the distinction between testimonial and hermeneutic types of injustice, cannot adequately deal with the injustice done to Indigenous epistemology. This happens primarily because of the significant difference in the way phenomena like self, mind, and knowledge are understood in Indigenous life. After discussing the salient features of Indigenous life, the article points out how the understanding of self, mind, and knowledge is interdependent in both Indigenous and Modern ways. Indigenous epistemology is primarily a matter of knowing and oriented towards a process rather than knowledge as a product. Treating knowing rather than knowledge as the basic epistemological category is not something that the Modern consciousness can do easily, given its tendency to find identity and satisfaction in the accumulation of knowledge. Thus, the article attempts to bring out the formidable difficulty in doing justice to the Indigenous ways of knowing by drawing attention to the need to employ a radically different kind of attention and embrace a reality different from the usual one.

This PhD by publication explores how ‘knowledges’ in social work research are authorized often to those who use and provide services. It draws together 11 publications, which are a mixture of sole and co authored peer reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and co authored publications for a range of charitable and public bodies both within the UK and Europe. The concept of ‘epistemic injustice’, is used to examine the connections between my published works. Stemming from the tradition of feminist philosophy, epistemic injustice is when the capacity to hear another’s testimony is diminished. With its focus on the interrelationship between hearing and being heard, epistemic justice has an under utilised value in social work practice and research. Building on the central themes of voice and justice, I argue that the discrediting of an individual testimony leads to individual and collective harm, as the opportunities for some to contribute to the common store of social meanings are diminished, including asylum seeking young people, victim and survivors of child sexual exploitation, child sexual abuse and child trafficking. My published works are examined as case studies to consider which and whose knowledge is taken seriously and why. I considers the harms done through the process of being discredited; both to the individual (their testimony and their identity –as sense of self is shaped by these negative associations) and to a developing knowledge (as accounts are missed and the potential growth of connections (be they defeating, justifying or inferential) is lost. Although all knowledge is partial and co-produced, I consider the obligation to make relevant efforts to understand how the world looks from different points of view, especially those who use and provide services.

Originally conceptualized by the philosopher, Miranda Fricker, epistemic injustice—unfair treatment of individuals and groups in knowledge‐related and communicative practices—is increasingly being employed to delineate individual and collective injustice in healthcare, information sciences, education and sustainable development. Embedded in many other forms of social injustice and inequality, epistemic injustice is a particularly serious problem for sustainable development, undermining the global community's ability to deal with ‘wicked’ problems. Building on the more conceptually developed, philosophical framework of epistemic injustice and recent research from other fields, this article develops a holistic action‐oriented framework of epistemic justice, namely fair treatment in knowledge‐related and communicative practices, for sustainable development and beyond. It also adds to the current framework of individual and collective injustice by including a range of new insights on structural and systemic epistemic injustice, such as linguistic injustice and epistemicide.

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom.

PurposeColonial frameworks remain embedded within nursing education, mandating a critical and ethical response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Calls to Action to integrate diverse knowledge systems into curricula and pedagogical practices. This paper aims to provide settler educators with a structured framework to decolonize educational practices and fostering culturally safe and reciprocal learning environments.MethodsThis framework integrates decolonial approaches from scholars and collectives, adapting them to local Indigenous contexts and institutional initiatives. The framework's five-phase process - (1) Grounding, (2) Interrogation, (3) New Learning, (4) Commitment, and (5) Rebuilding- was used to guide the critical examination and transformation of curriculum and pedagogy.Major Findings: Called to deepen their colonial consciousness, the authors engaged in learning and unlearning through intentional relationships with local Indigenous communities, being gifted knowledges from Elders and Indigenous scholars. The authors critically reflected on how nursing is taught and evaluated, focusing thier transformative change on their Health in a Global Context and Enacting Social Justice nursing courses. This process revealed the epistemic injustice and pervasive white-centring embedded in course design, assessments, and pedagogical approaches. Engaging in the decolonizing framework led to course redesign that prioritizes diverse ways of knowing in content, assessment, and pedagogy.ConclusionThis study highlights how engaging in a minor reform, can become a catalyst for broader decolonization efforts, but true transformation requires sustained commitment, critical self-reflection, and institutional accountability. Decolonizing nursing education is a collective responsibility, that involves dismantling colonial frameworks and actively prioritizing Indigenous knowledges within nursing pedagogy and practice.

Karim-Aly S. Kassam: Biocultural Diversity and Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Human Ecology in the Arctic

The practice of Emergency Management in Michigan raises anew the question of whose knowledge matters to whom and for what reasons, against the background of what projects, challenges, and systemic imperatives. In this paper, I offer a historical overview of state intervention laws across the United States, focusing specifically on Michigan’s Emergency Manager laws. I draw on recent analyses of these laws to develop an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic redlining, which, I suggest, is a form of group-based credibility discounting not readily countenanced by existing, ‘culprit-based’ accounts of epistemic injustice. I argue that epistemic redlining plays a crucial role in ongoing projects of racialized subordination and dispossession in Michigan, and that such discounting tends to have structural causes that can be difficult to identify and uproot. Contrary to the general thrust of recent work on the topic, I argue that epistemic redlining ought to be understood as a form of epistemic injustice.